uction revision to increase both
performance and stability made the final revision of the LX6 a killer motherboard as well
as a successful chance of redemption on ABIT's part.

After enabling the 100MHz bus speed setting the now
functional SoftMenuTM utility one thing quickly comes to notice, the BIOS
cannot recognize the newly implemented bus speed since it reports the CPU speed as if the
bus speed was set to a lower 83.3MHz setting. Does this mean that the 100MHz bus
speed doesn't work? Most definitely not! Further tests and benchmarks show
that the actual clock speed of the CPU, when using the 100MHz bus speed, does not reflect
an 83.3MHz setting...however it also doesn't reflect a 100MHz setting either! What's
up with the LX6's clock crystal?

Figure 3. (Left) Those chips you see there are what make the 100MHz bus speed
setting on the LX6 possible, you can thank them for the performance you receive from the
LX6 at the 100MHz setting.

When the motherboard interprets the signal it
receives from the user to enable the 100MHz setting internally the clock oscillator, not
designed for operation within that specification, does the best job it possibly can to
reach that 100MHz setting. However, the actual bus speed used when the 100MHz
setting is activated fluctuates in a direct variation to the processor clock multiplier,
for the most part. When the clock multiplier of the CPU was lowered from 4.0x to
3.0x the approximate memory bus speed of the LX6 jumped up from 91.5MHz to a whopping
106.6MHz!!! However when the clock multiplier was raised to 3.5x the bus speed
dropped to a incredibly low (low when compared to the previous 106.6MHz mark) 90.57MHz.
For the most part the higher bus speeds were achieved with lower clock multipliers,
however that doesn't ALWAYS hold true. The LX6 will randomly boot at the lowest
possible CPU bus speed of 89.0MHz when set to the 100MHz setting in SoftMenuTM
regardless of the clock multiplier in which case you receive a performance boost nearly
equivalent to that which you would receive if you had enabled the 83.3MHz frequency in the
BIOS. The 100MHz setting results in a bus clock frequency ranging from the lowest
setting of approximately 89.01MHz to the peak at about 106.67MHz with the most commonly
achieved speeds lying in the 91.115MHz to 94.5MHz region. What good is a 100MHz bus
speed setting if nothing will operate when using it? No good at all...HOWEVER the
LX6, when used with the proper peripherals, displays its excellent stability even at the
100MHz bus speed. With 2 x 32MB of Advanced Megatrends SDRAM the LX6 could be set to
the absolute fastest BIOS timings and it would complete all tests at the 100MHz bus speed
setting. It should be mentioned now that even with a genuine Pentium II - 300 the
highest the LX6 would boot at was 377MHz (~94.3MHz x 4.0) and the 100MHz x 4.5 setting
wouldn't work at all (oh darn...looks like we'll have to wait for the 333MHz Pentium II to
clock it at > 400MHz =)...) For your convenience, here is a list of peripherals
that have passed the test at the 100MHz bus speed with the LX6:

Memory

Storage

Controller Cards

Advanced Megatrends SDRAM

Corsair SDRAM

AOpen 24X CDROM

SyQuest SyJET (SCSI)

Western Digital Caviar

Symbios 875UW (UltraWide SCSI-3)

Video Adapters

ATI Xpert@Work (AGP)

Diamond Monster 3D

Matrox Millennium II (PCI)

Now I realize that the above
list is not a very comprehensive one, however the main hot-spots to look for when
diagnosing a system that won't boot at the 100MHz setting are your Video Card, and
Memory. There are reports of the STB Velocity 128 not working at the 100MHz setting,
I cannot personally confirm nor deny those claims until I receive my STB cards for
testing.

As mentioned earlier, the stability of the LX6
is truly first class...however the LX6 isn't populated with ANY oversized tantalum
capacitors...so how could it possibly be a stable motherboard? History has shown us
time and time again that size isn't all that matters, just take a look at our computers
today and compare them to the good old Eniac which was about as powerful as a hand held
calculator yet completely filled up a few rooms in sheer size. The LX6's 15
mid-sized capacitors are carefully positioned around the motherboard with high
concentrations around the Slot-1 IC, and the 7 onboard switching voltage regulators which
also add to the LX6's incredible stability. In all of the tests that were run on the
LX6, the test system only crashed once when using 2 x 32MB sticks of Corsair SDRAM with
the absolute fastest timings in the BIOS Chipset Features Setup.

ABIT seems to have fixed every single problem
that plagued the pre-release LX6 including its incompatibility with the Enlight 72xx
series 250W power supply. The final revision LX6 now works perfectly with the
Enlight power supplies and doesn't seem to have any other noticeable problems, just to
safely test the 100MHz setting the test system was left running quite a few memory/CPU
intensive tasks overnight. The result? The LX6 is one of the fastest and most
stable Pentium II motherboards in the world today! ABIT took the world by surprise
when they released their IT5H over a year ago and they have done it again with the
LX6.

The only real problem with the LX6? A lack of high
quality tantalum capacitors on the LX6 makes its future reliability
unpredictable...running your system for months at the 100MHz bus speed setting could prove
to be very hazardous...but then again it might not =)